Perpich News
Minnesota Reflective Artist Award is Ready to Pilot – We Invite your Participation!
March 5, 2024
Through the Minnesota Reflective Artist Award, students develop artistic knowledge, skills, and thinking to deeply engage in practices of the artistic field and better understand themselves as an artist, musician, dancer, actor, and more!
The Professional Development and Resource Programs group at Perpich Center has been working to develop a statewide award for high school arts students. (Arts = dance, theater, music, visual arts and media arts.) Now finally, after 18 months and 6 iterations, we are ready to pilot one part of the Minnesota Reflective Artist Award (MRAA) between now and May 10, 2024. We invite you and a few of your 10-12th grade students to be involved in the pilot.
Why participate?
Our #1 goal in this award is to support ongoing participation in high quality, standards-based arts classes at the high school level.
For teachers: This is an opportunity to deepen skills that students are developing through their work in the arts and make that thinking visible. These (21st century skills) transfer to college and career and include goal setting, persistence, envisioning, reflecting, communicating clearly, analyzing, evaluating, problem solving, considering various points of view, and working independently.
For students: This is an opportunity to gain statewide recognition for their unique knowledge, skills, and reflective thinking in the arts over multiple years.
For this pilot, each 10-12th grade student that participates would:
- Complete one project centered in the Create, Respond, Perform (dance, theater, music) or Present (visual arts, media arts) artistic process. Examples of projects are included in the pilot journal. This project could be part of your regular class work or something that they complete independently, and just check-in with you periodically.
- Use the pilot journal to reflect on their work, start to finish. Students will make a daily entry as prompted, respond to an Essential Question near completion of their project, and write a final summary.
- Provide feedback on the experience.
Your role in this pilot:
- Identify one or more students to pilot the MRAA project and journal. Request pilot journals by contacting lorene.mcgrane@pcae.k12.mn.us and we will mail you one for each participating student.
- Support students to frame their project in the Create, Respond, Perform, or Present artistic process.
- By Friday, May 10, mail students’ pilot journals to Perpich Center for Arts Education and email a digital file of each student’s completed project.
- Provide your observations and feedback on the experience. Upon completion, we are able to provide you with a certificate of 5 clock hours in honor of your time, observations, and feedback.
We know you have more than enough work already, and truly appreciate your participation in shaping this statewide award for Minnesota high school students. This summer we will work through feedback from the pilot and then plan to introduce the Minnesota Reflective Artist Award program statewide before the 2024-2025 school year.